Can't Be Satisfied: the Life and Times of Muddy Watersby Robert Gordon408pp, Jonathan Cape, £18.99

When Muddy Waters heard that a white man was out looking for him, he thought that he'd been busted. The unexpected appearance of a white official on a Mississippi cotton plantation in the early 1940s could only mean trouble, and Waters was not only the most popular guitar picker on Stovall's Plantation, he was also its most notorious bootlegger.

But the polite young man who arrived at Waters's cabin seemed a strange kind of revenue officer. First he asked if he might take a sip of water, then astonished his host by sharing the same cup. Next, he pulled out an acoustic guitar, and heaved a 300lb hunk of recording machinery from the boot of his car. As the official set up a microphone and inserted the first of a set of vast acetate cylinders into the machine, it began to dawn on the young cotton worker that the stranger didn't want to bust his ass - he wanted him to sing.

The significance of the meeting between Muddy Waters and the folk musicologist Alan Lomax can hardly be overestimated. Lomax's death last month at the age of 87 severed one of the last living links to the source of the Mississippi delta blues. In the years before and after the second world war, Lomax traversed the churches, cotton fields and penitentiaries of the American South, collecting authentic work songs, prison chants, spirituals and folk-blues for the recorded archive of the Library of Congress. It was the pioneering efforts of Lomax and his associate, John Work, which preserved the songs and voices of Blind Willie McTell, Son House and Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, among many others.

Although Lomax failed in his quest to trace the legendary Robert Johnson before the singer succumbed to a slug of poisoned whiskey, he was redirected towards the most accomplished inheritor of Johnson's keening style - the 28-year-old plantation worker McKinley Morganfield, familiarly known as Muddy Waters.

If Lomax had never recorded Leadbelly, then skiffle king Lonnie Donegan could not have appropriated Leadbelly's "Rock Island Line", which in turn inspired John Lennon to form the Quarrymen. And if the teenage Mick Jagger had not been carrying a copy of The Best of Muddy Waters when he bumped into Keith Richards on a train, the pair would not have been prompted to play together, adopting Muddy's song "Rollin' Stone" as the name of their band. Plenty of other less successful groups did likewise. The Manish Boys may have vanished into obscurity, but their singer, David Bowie, went on to make a name for himself.

Nineteen years after his death, Waters has become a commodity. He has been sampled by Moby, provided the soundtrack for a Viagra advert, and even had his ill-advised psychedelic album, Electric Mud, cited as an influence by rapper Chuck D. In the late 1990s a nightclub chain, the House of Blues, purchased the wooden shack in which Waters was recorded by Alan Lomax. The firm packaged the hut as a museum exhibit and put it out on tour. The cabin has since earned far more money than its occupant ever did.

You could make a case that the history of rock is simply the story of the blues getting louder. Waters played a crucial role in pumping up the volume. He inherited the genre's rural, southern roots and introduced it to urban, industrial noise. Emboldened by the breakthrough of his first Library of Congress recording, Muddy moved to Chicago in 1943, where he found the aggressive drinking clubs of the South Side a far remove from the world of Mississippi fish fries. "First thing I wanted when I went into the clubs was an amplifier," he said. "You get a more pure thing out of an acoustic, but you get more noise out of an amplifier."

Southern blacks were not the only ethnic group pouring into Chicago at this time. Among the flood of eastern European immigrants was the second white man to have a decisive influence on Waters's life: the Polish Jewish record-executive, Leonard Chess. Unlike Lomax, Chess (originally Chez) was neither a philanthropist nor a scholar, but an uncompromising former nightclub owner. Leonard Chess did not have an instinctive understanding of the blues: "What's that noise - what the fuck is he supposed to be singing about?" he exploded as Muddy and his band struck up in the studio for the first time. But that did not preclude the two men from striking up an almost familial 28-year relationship.

Waters provided the Chess label with its first hit, "Can't Be Satisfied", an electrified re-working of one of the songs he had originally performed on his doorstep for Alan Lomax. The Chess stable grew to include a formidable line-up of Muddy Waters's friends and associates, including Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, Otis Spann and Buddy Guy, as well as providing a home for his principal rival, Howlin' Wolf.

These were the artists for whom Jagger and Richards pooled their allowances as soon as the latest import became available. It was the vociferous championship of the Rolling Stones, John Mayall, Eric Clapton and other young, British blues musicians which restored Waters's fortunes when his popularity suffered a dip in the 1960s. By the time of his death from lung cancer at the age of 68, Waters was unassailable in his position as the patriarch of pop.

There is a tendency for scholarship to smother the blues. It can be an arid business deconstructing music which prioritises feeling over formulae. Waters never learned to read or write, and his handling of the 12-bar structure ran to 13-and-a-half bars, or nine-and-a-bit, if he felt like it. At the other end of the scale, biographies by fans or rock journalists tend to have their limitations exposed and their prejudices revealed over the course of a lengthy volume.

Somewhere between the two, Robert Gordon, author of the acclaimed Elvis study It Came From Memphis, is well placed to deliver an authoritative account of Waters's life. He prefers a chatty, informal style and is not shy about stating his preferences, but he backs everything up with scrupulous notes and supplements the work with exhaustive appendices.

Most importantly, Gordon comes from Memphis and knows the territory. This first-hand identification seems vital for the documentation of an oral culture which is rapidly receding from memory. Little paperwork exists for Waters - he never signed a contract with Leonard Chess: "I just belongs to the Chess family", he used to say. Gordon managed to reach some of Waters's closest associates, most notably the great guitarist Jimmy Rogers, just before they died. But the lack of sources means that he often has to rely on his response to the music and the strength of his imagination. As well as giving plentiful evidence of his passion for Waters's work, Gordon illuminates his text with passages of novelistic visualisation.

One occurs when the author takes the liberty of following his subject to the bathroom. Muddy has just come off stage from his regular spot at Chicago's Zanzibar club and is fighting his way through a throng of well-wishers, desperate to pee. Willie Dixon, an aspiring songwriter, seizes his chance. As Muddy passes water, Dixon sidles up and rapidly pitches the idea for a new song, "Hoochie Coochie Man".

Gordon imagines all six foot and 300 lbs of the songwriter "with his head at an odd angle around the hand-towel dispenser" as he outlines the chord changes and runs through the words: "Suddenly the noise in the Zanzibar seemed to die away, the stench of old beer and gin-soaked floorboards dissipated, the smoke dispersed. Muddy's only concern was to gather the band and hit the stage before he forgot the lyrics."

That may not have been precisely how "Hoochie Coochie Man" came into being, but it's possible. The blues is a spontaneous form and when inspiration strikes, it demands that you go with it. Even when you have to go.